Theatre
Michael Portillo - Murder most foul
Published 09 August 2004
Theatre - A dark musical about a man bent on personal revenge. By Michael Portillo
Sweeney Todd
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1
Sweeney Todd was a mass murderer. He was executed in 1802 having been convicted on a specimen charge of killing Francis Thornhill, but at his trial the prosecution alleged that he had despatched as many as 160 people. That estimate was deduced from the haul of personal effects found at Todd's barber-shop in Fleet Street. Evidently his motive was robbery. You might as well write a musical about Dr Harold Shipman.
It is puzzling that Stephen Sondheim was so gripped by the story when he encountered it in 1973. He claimed he had always been interested in Grand Guignol, but there was little public demand for it by then. The Paris theatre that gave its name to the genre had gone dark in 1962, no longer able to attract audiences for its macabre and violent dramas. Admittedly, when Sondheim first saw Sweeney Todd as a stage play at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, the Liverpool playwright Christopher Bond had transformed the story. Todd was presented as a man di-verted from his natural goodness by the suffering inflicted on his wife and daughter by an invented character, Judge Turpin.
Sondheim commented: "Sweeney Todd is a man bent on personal revenge, the way we all are in one way or another." Are we? That's news to me, and revealing about Sondheim. Despite the "vengeance" cop-out, the Todd that Sondheim wrote into his musical still murders indiscriminately and, with the help of Margery Lovett, disposes of the flesh into her exceedingly good meat pies.
Speculating on the contents of those pies gives Sondheim his greatest opportunities as a lyricist, and the instant rhymes tumble out to gasps of appreciation from the audience. "The trouble with poet/Is how you know it/'s deceased./Try a little priest." His skills as a wordsmith shine throughout Sweeney Todd, and the music is quasi-operatic. The problem with the work's structure is that the black humour is funniest in the middle of the show. The descent into mass murder (despite Sondheim's soft-focus lens, Todd kills half a dozen while we watch) brings the performance to an ending that is oddly anti- climactic, even disgusting.
Directed by John Doyle, this is a re-markable production because, with the exception of Paul Hegarty in the title role, all the singers also perform on musical instruments, providing their own orchestra on stage. It was probably this extra-ordinary display of virtuosity that, on the night I attended, brought much of the audience instantly to its feet for a standing ovation as the curtain fell.
Karen Mann is outstanding as Mrs Lovett. She fizzes her way through the part, maximising the humour, delivering the lyrics with faultless clarity and filling the stage with her irrepressible vulgarity (that's when she is not playing the trumpet). Rebecca Jenkins spends much of the show performing either on the cello or the pipe. But she is also the love interest, Johanna, daughter of Sweeney Todd. She produces a beautiful soprano for the song (aria?) "Green Finch and Linnet Bird".
That points to a difficulty created by this variety of multi-talented performance. As the sailor Anthony (played by another cellist, David Ricardo-Pearce) becomes besotted with Johanna, it is hard for them to develop eye contact, let alone passionate intimacy. During most of the performance, they need to have their legs wrapped around their instruments rather than each other. It is not easy, either, for the audience to develop much hatred for Colin Wakefield's judge when he plays the flute so beautifully.
In that stylised setting, somewhat akin to a semi-staged performance, Hegarty produces a sort of flat-pack Todd. Dressed in a modern black leather jacket, white shirt and tie, his performance is as understated as his costume. If the Bond/Sondheim Todd is meant to attract our sympathy, Hegarty is not going to work for it, and I believe it's better that way.
The Trafalgar Studios have emerged in what used to be the Whitehall Theatre. The steeply raked auditorium for 380 people totters above a tiny stage at floor level. The actors pass freely from stage to auditorium, drawing us into the horror. The action is set around a coffin of slatted black wood mounted on a trestle at the centre of the stage. With a piano, two cellos and a double bass also to be accommodated, there is little room for Mann's bloodthirsty jigs, and Jenkins often plays her instrument seated on the coffin's lid.
Each character whose throat is cut dons a white jacket with bloodstained lapels. This inexorably becomes the cast's uniform. With each murder, large amounts of red liquid are poured from one white bucket to another. It doesn't look much like blood, and is not a strong stage device, but it serves to emphasise the essential obscenity of the piece.
Sondheim's lyrics tell us that Todd served a dark and vengeful god. According to the composer's biographer, Meryle Secrest, Sondheim is known to bear grudges. When the wife of Hal Prince, the director of the original Broadway production, first heard Sweeney Todd, she said to Sondheim: "This is nothing to do with Guignol. It's the story of your life." I do hope not.
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